Description

Matthew Cooperman

Human folly is to believe our ziggurat is real, a really long time. But as the founder of modern geology Sir George Lyell declared only as recently as 1830, “Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them.” Alternately, the Talking Heads circa 2009 offered “same as it ever was, look where my hand was / time isn’t holding up, time isn’t after us.” Watching the days go by, we write, we build, we grasp, we render frangible towers in the sky. Matthew Cooperman’s Time, & Its Monument captures this eroded sequence by tracking signs of human impermanence: solve et coagula, the inevitable falling away and coming together of all matter, how and what we watch, and who, and the collaborative acts of empathy by which humans might, if not extend, meaningfully ornament the Anthropocene. These are prose poems, cut ups, necessary collages. From the ekphrastic conversations between Cooperman and visual artists Simonetta Moro and Peter Richards on matters varied as Wittgenstein, the panopticon, and the Gulf Wars to the poetics of drought emerging through erasure with Ed Dorn’s The Shoshoneans, his famous study of the Great Basin, Cooperman’s Time, & Its Monument frames the artifacts of the human set: “in the long  run recurrence / the stacking of shells / days certain seasons / the steeple accrues.”